You have a lot of
great material on your blog at the moment, hard as it is to follow the quotes
and sort out one source from another. But this: "The
human person is emerging not as an evolving animal but as 'another Christ' who
is an autonomous and self-determining ‘I' in search of the
Absolute.” That makes me shudder. I can make sense of it, but it
really risks reducing Ratzinger and Sokolowski, to Kant and Anthony
Kennedy — bad ju-ju.
I have sometimes thought of your parting guidance from the workshop in MA years back, which there is no reason for you to recall. Do we make progress — intellectually, spiritually — in shorts bursts of maximum energy and speed, or slow steady effort with slow steady grace? Or is this a false dualism?
I have sometimes thought of your parting guidance from the workshop in MA years back, which there is no reason for you to recall. Do we make progress — intellectually, spiritually — in shorts bursts of maximum energy and speed, or slow steady effort with slow steady grace? Or is this a false dualism?
Dear Joe,
If the
incarnate Son of God reaches the absolute perfection of Himself as enfleshed divine Person, He does so in His total gift of Self to
death on the Cross. There is a development of His human will that has been
assumed with the body/soul from the Virgin and laden with all the sin of all
men of all time. He took on that sin as His own, and He - as divine
Person - willed with that created human will (now assumed as His, and it is the
divine Person that is doing the willing by means of a human will that is His) obedience to death: "I have come down from heaven not to do
my [human] will, but the Will of Him Who sent Me" (Jn. 6, 38). The
God-Man has now become fully himself. And we become Him by "learning to
turn all the circumstances and events of my life into occasions of loving
you" (Prayer card to St. Josemaria Escriva) by the obedience of moment by
moment that is faith - until death. Amen. Fr. Bob
Joe,
I just noticed
when posting our replay that I have the typo, "The God-man is not
fully HImself when I, obviously want to write "now" fully Himself - and hence there is growth and
development in Christ Who is the very meaning of absolute, but yet developing. Yes, of course, this sounds like Hegel, but the Hegel that has
not been understood and tucked away in the stagnant category of German
idealism. It all goes back - for me - to Ratzinger waking me from my
categorical and abstractive slumber with: "the Father is not the Father
and then engenders the Son, but is the very act of engendering the Son."
That says it all!!! Fr. Bob
Go to Charles Taylor
on Hegel ("Hegel For Our Day" (?) and Walsh on Modern Philosophy and
the misnomer of German thought as "idealism" when it is
existentialism. And then consider again Gaudium et Spes #24: “man, the only
earthly being God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.”
And then go and read carefully Robert Barron’s “The Priority of Christ” to see
the Person of Christ as the very meaning of “To Be” and then the resurrection
and correct interpretation of authentic Thomism in this light. Fr. Bob
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